Last evening, the Oriental Institute in Chicago opened its exhibit on looting, with a lecture by Prof. Gibson, and then held a candlelight vigil, in conjunction with the non-profit SAFE, Saving Antiquites for Everyone (www.savingantiquities.org), to commemorate the 5th anniversary of the looting.
Donny George, former Dir of the Iraq Museum attended, and other vigils are being held un universities across the country and worldwide.
Perhaps 6,000 of the artifacts looted from the museum have been returned. Major sites of Sumerian culture continue to be looted on a massive, industrial scale--Umma, Isin, Zabalam--their surfaces so pitted with craters they resemble lunar landscapes. This illicit digging destroys context, the relationship of artifacts to the site & each other, and thus valuable information about their production, use, depostion, social & culture values, in short, their voice. Even if they ar recovered, this information is lost forever.

Truly this is an issue of winning hearts & minds, of educating the public of the irretriveable loss of context through illicit excavations, of our shared and collective past. Saddest of all for Iraq, the shared heritage of Mesopotamin civilization represents an important integrating factor for all groups--Shiite, Sunni, Kurd--while preservation of the sites and archaeological heritage, if successful, could represent the potential for tourist revenue when the oil runs out.
I speak as both a student of Mesopotamian archaeology at the OI and a member of SAFE.

Don't forget that the coalition forces also converted the ancient city of Babylon into a military base, shortly after the invasion. The U.S. and Polish military dug trenches through soil filled with archeological deposits and built a helicopter landing pad. Heavy vehicles left cracks and scars in the ground of Babylon's Processional Way.

I would avoid characterizing the oversight of the museum's looting, as well as the occupation of Babylon, as a mistake. As a matter of fact, these are mindful acts of neglect and occupation. And they are war crimes - to neglect looting, as well as to turn an archeological site into a military base, directly violates the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, which the United States signed in 1954.

Experts have told me, again and again, that these war crimes could easily have been avoided. Instead, even in the face of international outrage, they weren't. The Bush Administration and the Pentagon instead chose to take a great loss in the war for "hearts-and-minds" and, meanwhile, divert its resources to fix huge problems it started.

The base on Babylon has been closed since 2004. Thankfully, the State Department is now embarking on project to renovate the ancient city. That is good to know. But numerous experts on this issue have said that there is currently no fully-developed program led by the United States to coordinate with bodies like the Oriental Institute, the Iraqi government and security forces in the country. I wonder - why didn't the United States military set up such a program to protect Iraq's archeological sites before it invaded the country? Obviously, that would not only have been smart, but legally sound.

It is good that there is now an effort to fix Babylon. Yet that is not enough of an effort, I think. The United States should set up a governmental body to preserve and protect Iraq's cultural institutions and archeological sites. Some might say that this responsibility belongs entirely to Iraq's Ministry of Culture. But as long as the United States occupies Iraq, the United States is responsible for protecting Iraq's cultural property and heritage. It makes sense, then, that there should be a coordinated and focused effort to do so.

The question of why the US military did not set up a program before the invasion to protect Iraq's cultural sites is a very complicated one, which Antiquities Under Siege delves into in detail. (It is worth noting, by the way, that the Future of Iraq Project run by Ryan Crocker out of the State Dept forgot to set up a working group on culture until just before the invasion).